


Take a Cup of Kindness Yet

by apotheotic



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Depression, Dysfunctional Relationships, F/M, Holidays, Post-Sburb, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-09
Updated: 2012-01-09
Packaged: 2017-10-29 06:51:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,189
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/316941
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apotheotic/pseuds/apotheotic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>the thing about having a time-nonlinear boyfriend is that you find yourself unexpectedly alone on the most inopportune of occasions. </i></p><p>on New Year’s Eve, Rose finds herself maudlin and wondering what it means to be with Dave through the thick and through the bitter thin.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Take a Cup of Kindness Yet

**Author's Note:**

> Rose is sort of the perfect outlet for projecting Unhappy Feelings. this fic was written on New Year's, and originally posted at [my tumblr](http://johnlaughingalonewithgushers.tumblr.com/post/15119263092/).

The thing about having a time-nonlinear boyfriend is that you find yourself unexpectedly alone on the most inopportune of occasions. For instance, tonight, the first  New Year’s Eve of your life together as proper adults, and you are sitting alone on the sofa with two glasses of warm champagne set side-by-side on the coffee table at the tips of your toes. They were chilled an hour ago, when Dave’s hand covered yours and you poured them off together, waiting for the drop of the ball on the television. He set them down and turned to make a remark, probably acerbic and critical of your choice of beverage, and then he was gone. Forty-five minutes ago, people cheered in New York City, kissed and shouted themselves hoarse and watched a giant glittering behemoth of glass descend upon them with the rest of the world watching, too. Clocks in your timezone turned over. You did not stir from your perch on the couch. As so often finds itself the case these days, you are waiting.

   
After narrowly averting calamity in a game you played what seems like a lifetime ago, the two of you along with Jade and John were granted normal life renewed. It seemed like a dream. But when you were maybe fifteen, you realized that something was strange with Dave. At first it was little things: he wouldn’t be there the morning after sleeping over, presumably gone out for an early coffee, or simply to avoid the sappy embarrassment of having to wake in the same bed as a girl. Missing a beat in one of his legendary rap-diatribes. You would call out to him when he had gone into the kitchen for something, and receive no ironically-delayed reply. You didn’t worry, because it was Dave, and he had behaved more strangely before.  
   
Then, the time you had been crossing the street in Albany, holding his hand mainly to avoid losing each other in the jostle of Christmas shoppers and - you looked back; he wasn’t there anymore. He would be kissing you one moment and not the next. These irregularities, as you frankly found it more comforting to think of them, grew more and more common as the months passed into years. It was as though he was losing his grip on something, the thing that kept him tied to the same fabric as you and John and Jade and everyone else played out your lives’ tapestry upon.   
   
You wanted to research a cure, but you also knew that you already understood. The same way John could make kites float beautifully but sometimes the wind would tug too hard at his clothes as though trying to tear them from him, the way Jade could move through her house without walking if she wished but sometimes heavy things would shift and groan or the air shimmer around her unbidden, and the same as you sometimes heard a heavy heartbeat of voices pulsing under your own in your dreams, on occasion granting illumination but more often casting a dark ether around your mind that grew harder and harder to cast off - just the same, Dave could unset the flow of time and pinpoint a new place to be in it, but the price of that gift unravelling was that his turntables flowed less smoothly and finally began to stutter and spin with no heed of him at all.

Clinically, theoretically, you understand. And yet when you think of watching your daughter’s first footsteps, years from now when Dave will be less here than gone, without him there to witness them, your heart twists unpleasantly and if you were not Rose Lalonde and thoroughly above such weak impulses you would certainly begin to cry. You imagine graduation, how he will try so hard to be there for you on the most important milestone in your life, and not be able to make it for all his trying. You imagine slipping a wedding ring onto empty space still warm with the afterimage of his presence, still tinted with the scent of his cologne. On this night, this relatively minor occasion in the grand scheme of things, which will come around perhaps another seventy times within your lifetime but which you were nevertheless anticipating greatly, you are sitting contemplating two untouched flutes of champagne and looking down the barrel of the rest of your life. 

It is a deeply shameful and personal thought, one you would not whisper above a breath even in your own mind, but you are quite frankly terrified at the prospect of spending so much of your life alone, and you don’t know whether you can bear it.

The clock shows ten ‘til one, and you reluctantly accept that he isn’t coming back tonight. You gather yourself from the couch with as little deflated posture as you can manage, and head toward the bathroom down the hall. The night is going to be long and cold. Nights like these, you hate him for being gone, for not being able to control it better, for the omnipresent, heavy promise that someday he won’t be able to control it at all. You even hate John, a little, for having failed to reset the universe properly so that you could all be washed clean of your time in the Game. Mostly, though, you hate yourself. Rose, who is too stupid after all to fix Dave. Rose, who, failing that, cannot even be faithful enough to stick with him despite his brokenness. Rose, the coward, who crumples at the slightest adversity when all of her friends have endured so much worse -

A crash resounds from the living room, and you jump out of your skin, whirl bewildered toward the sound with the chorus of  _faithless Rose cowardly Rose unworthy Rose worthless Rose_  still ringing in your ears. You bump, quite abruptly, into a familiar chest.

“Heh,” says Dave, “would you look at that. Made it on time after all.”

“Your idea of ‘on time’ could use some work,” you quip, and step back. He doesn’t reach out for you, and a part of you still clenches in the fear that this could be some cruel hallucination - he is unreal, or if he tried to touch you his fingers would pass straight through. You swallow back the doubts. “You’re late.”

When you kiss him his lips are warm beneath yours, his hands a solid comfort on your waist. These are the first real moments of the new year: Dave, here, the way you will have him even if it is not all the time. You hold that tight in your mind like a resolution, like a wedding vow.  _I will love this man, even when he is not here, even when it aches with emptiness to be bound to him and yet not to have him_. The clock chimes the first hour of the future, and the future is here, the future is rushing toward you down a long dark tunnel but Dave’s lips on your skin burn more brightly than the darkness, illuminating a path toward all the good that is to come.


End file.
